Why I Did Not Study Poetry in Grad School

On poetry, an argument, and twenty years of hindsight

Years ago I got into an argument with the chair of a highly-touted creative writing department that cost me the chance to pursue a higher degree in the writing of poetry. In hindsight, I think this was for the best.

The argument spun around two disagreements.

First was whether poems should make sense.

His position was that a poem must make sense and if it either does not make sense or is so inscrutable as to make sense-meaning itself an impossible task, well, then what you have written was not in fact a poem.

My position was the opposite.

I felt that poems have no obligations to readers at all — including the matter of whether they make sense.

The second was whether poems could be constructed by chance.

His position was that the crafting of a poem need be a laborious and methodical task of authorship and that the final result was an encapsulation of logic as much as it were an aesthetic trick.

My position was that there could be no rules or constraints on how a poem is properly crafted or constructed. Therefore, the assignment of chance, divination, and acts of the subconscious were not only fair game but preferred as means of eliciting something deeper and more profound — less objectively bound by logic.

It was on this second disagreement that the argument became most heated.

He nearly yelled over the phone when I brought up the matter of The Changing Light at Sandover. In his mind it was a complete waste of paper. I think my ultimate response was something along the lines of: “Well, maybe you just don’t get it.”

That signaled the end of our phone call and the closing of the matter of whether I would be admitted to this prestigious program. And I can tell you that by the end of the call, one of us still believed it was indeed a prestigious program.

It was likely youth that gave me the tenacity to argue such ridiculous things. But, somehow, twenty years later, I don’t seem to have matured out of the position I expressed on the telephone. If anything, pursuing the writing of lyrics and poems — mostly in solitude and mostly without publication over the last two decades — has only steeled my resolve in the thesis that I argued on behalf of on that fateful phone call. Because I am often surprised and overcome by the words that seem to speak to me from somewhere else even as I type them. I am entangled with that mystery.

In representation of this, I offer the following. A poem crafted partly by chance, partly in semi-trance — and then edited down into form. This one written maybe ten years ago.

It may not be a perfect poem, but it encapsulates my method (or anti-method): draw in the words from any source, through any means of association, preferably in a state where the brain posts no sentinels against the illogical or the weird. Then, act as the objective editor of this work — act as if these words and these verses were not written by you, yourself, but rather were turned in late by some intrepid fool and now here you sit at a desk alone as the night editor. Yours is the task to decide the voice that accompanies the words of some other who has walked off into the night.

I occasionally will shiver at the thought of what might have happened to my sense of verse if I had let my brain stew too long in the academy. I’m sure I’d be more successful. And yet, I would be lost.

Exordium

You were a special student.
In that, we had something
In common as we began
To feed this argument
Now so many years ago.

The crux of your defense—
Wry in the dark chasm—
With effort did we breach.

So, in spite of ourselves and
Those who had vainly warned 
We fools not to be like them,
We scorned admonitions
Not to pickle the death shrug.

Alas, the droll strike while
Quotidian word play
Swells not unlike dawn mist.

Watching the fools in the garden
Gathering herbs and stalks
To make tincture according
To ancient fibs passed down
Impishly such as by soused

Cachinnating kelpie.
Meanwhile, we patrolled
Astral sand for footprints.

Discreet, we sought the lesser
Of keys to the kingdom,
And, bemused once discovered,
Played invisible tricks
In the parlor of the mind.

In that weird asylum
We were soon met well by
A coarse but stoic wraith.

“I shall give you lessons three.
The first to walk at speed
Enough to leap abysm
In scarce a single bound.
Second be to not look down.

Third, of course, recognize
That from these teachings rise
Pedicels bearing ache.”

Traversing the light of death,
We wandered starry fields
Where poppy sidereal
Blades of luminescence
Tickled our chafed naked calves.

“Now remember, you, me,”
Whilst blazing, demon winked,
Whistling o’er the abyss.

Upon return, a numbness
Beseeched us. Homecoming
Itself seemed like wandering
At too far a distance
From one’s very own shadow.

“Remember, this is nay
Yet last you will hear bid
Of me,” the voice, blithely.